Shame (35 page)

In the Fifteenth Century ? 239

pulled the beard of the religious teacher engaged to teach them
handwriting and the Quran, tore down curtains, stained sofas, got
lost, cut themselves, fought against vaccination needles and tetanus
jabs, begged for and then lost interest in pets, stole radios, and
burst into top-level meetings in that demented house. Meanwhile
Good News had expanded yet again, and she was so big she
looked as if she'd swallowed a whale. Everyone knew with a ter-
rible certainty that the progression was continuing, that this time
no fewer than eight babies would be produced, and that next year
there would be nine, and after that ten, and so on, so that by her
thirtieth birthday she would have given birth to no fewer than
seventy-seven children; the worst was still to come. It is possible
that if Raza and Talvar had not been thinking of other things they
might have guessed what she would do; but maybe nobody would
have stopped her anyway, because the oppression of the children
had started to unhinge everyone who lived amid the uproar of
their numbers.

O, this Talvar Ulhaq: what uneasinesses, what ambiguities
hung around the stiff-necked chief of the Federal Security Force!
Hyder's son-in-law, Harappa's right-hand man . . . after the fall of
Iskander Harappa, Raza Hyder came under considerable pressure
to do something about his daughter's husband. The FSF was not a
popular organization; Raza had no option but to disband it. But
still there were cries for Talvar's head. So it was just as well that
the former polo star chose this moment to prove that he had
meant every syllable of his loyal vow to be the perfect son-in-law.
He handed Raza Hyder his secret, detailed dossier on the Mir
Harappa killing, from which it was obvious that Haroun Harappa
had committed the murder, out of his ancient hatred for his father;
and that the evil genius behind the unsavoury affair had been none
other than the Chairman of the Popular Front, who had once
murmured, patiently: 'Life is long.'

'There is evidence that he misused public money developing
the tourist trade, for his own benefit, in Aansu,' Raza Hyder
briefed General Tughlak, 'but this is much better. This will finish
him completely.'

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Shame ? 240

The act of loyal treason committed by Talvar Ulhaq changed
everything. The Popular Front was banned from the elections;
then the elections were postponed; then postponed again; then
shelved; then cancelled. It was in this period that the initials
CMLA, standing for Chief Martial Law Administrator, acquired a
new meaning. People began to say what they really stood for was
Cancel My Last Announcement.

And the memory of a right hand on a Book refused to fade.

Chairman Iskander Harappa was taken from Bagheeragali rest
house to the Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. He was kept there in soli-
tary confinement. He suffered from malaria and from infections of
the colon. There were bouts of severe influenza. His teeth began
to fall out; and he lost weight in other ways as well. (We have
mentioned that Omar Khayyam Shakil, his old companion in dev-
ilry, was also slimming down in this period, under the benign
influence of a Parsee ayah.)

The trial took place in the High Court at Lahore, before five
Punjabi judges. Harappa, it will be recalled, hailed from the
Mohenjo estate in Sind. The testimony of ex-FSF Chief Talvar
Ulhaq was central to the prosecution's case. Iskander Harappa
gave evidence in his own defence, accusing Talvar of fabricating
evidence to save his own skin. At one point Iskander used the
phrase, 'Damn it,' and was reprimanded for the use of bad lan-
guage in court. He apologized: 'My state of mind is not good.'
The Chief Justice replied: 'We don't care.' This made Iskander
lose his temper. 'I've had enough,' he cried, 'of insults and
humiliations.' The Chief Justice ordered police officers: 'Take that
man away until he regains his senses.' Another judge added the
following remark: 'We cannot tolerate this. He thinks he is the
former Prime Minister, but we do not care for him.' All this is on
the record.

At the end of the six-month trial, Iskander Harappa and also
the absent Mr Haroun Harappa were sentenced to hang by the
neck until dead. Iskander was immediately moved into the death-

In the Fifteenth Century ? 241

cell at Kot Lakhpat jail. He was given just seven days, instead of
the usual thirty, to lodge an appeal.

Iskander announced: 'Where there is no justice, there is no
point in seeking it. I shall not appeal.'

That night Begum Talvar Ulhaq, the former Good News
Hyder, was found in her bedroom at the Hyder residence, hanged
by the neck, dead. On the floor beneath her dangling feet lay the
broken rope of her first attempt, snapped by the enormous weight
of her pregnancy. But she had not been deterred. There was jas-
mine in her hair and she had filled the room with the fragrance of
Joy by Jean Patou, the most expensive perfume in the world,
imported from France to cover up the smell of her bowels
opening in death. A suicide note had been attached to the obscene
globularity of her midriff by a baby's safety-pin. It referred to her
terror of the arithmetical progression of babies marching out of
her womb. It did not mention what she thought of her husband,
Talvar Ulhaq, who would never be brought to trial on any
charge.

At the funeral of Naveed Talvar, Raza Hyder kept staring at
the cryptic and estranged figure of his wife Bilquis in her black
burqa; he remembered all at once how he had first come upon her
in that distant fortress full of refugees, how she had been as naked
then as she was clothed now; he saw her history as a slow retreat
from that early nudity into the secrecy of the veil.

'Ai, Bilquis,' he murmured, 'what happened to our lives?'

'You want to feel bad?' she answered, much too loudly. 'Then
feel bad for the life that has been lost. I blame you for this. Shame,
shame, poppy-shame.'

He understood that she was no longer the luminous girl with
whom he had fallen in love in a different universe, her reason had
gone, and so he made Colonel Shuja escort her home before the
funeral rites were completed. Sometimes he thinks the walls are
throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and
then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as
iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is. In the armour of

Shame ? 242

this blindness he recites: I, Iskander Harappa, Prime Minister,
Chairman of the Popular Front, husband of Rani, father to Arju-
mand, formerly devoted lover of. He has forgotten her name and
forces his eyelids open, he has to use his fingers to push them up,
and the walls are still pulsating. Cockroaches dislodged by the
movement fall down upon his head; they are three inches long
and when he brushes them to the floor he has to crush them with
his bare heels; they crackle like pine-kernel shells on the cement.
There is a drumming in his ears.

What is the shape of death? Death's cell is ten feet long, seven
wide, eight high, twenty point seven four cubic yards of finality
beyond which there awaits a certain courtyard, a last cigar, silence.
/ will insist on Romeo y Juliettas. That story also ends in death . . .
They call this solitary confinement but he is not alone, there are
flies fornicating on his toenails and mosquitoes drinking from the
pools of his wrists, putting the blood to some use before it all goes
to waste. Four guards in the corridor, too: in short, plenty of com-
pany. And sometimes they let his lawyers pay a call.

Through the door of the iron bars comes the stink of the
latrine. In the winter he shivers but the low temperature takes the
edge off that brown and foetid smell. In the hot season they switch
off the ceiling fan and the odour bubbles and swells, stuffing its
putrid fingers up his nose, making his eyes bulge even though his
tear ducts are dry. He goes on hunger strike and when he is almost
too weak to move they hang a blanket over the latrine door and
switch on the fan. But when he asks for drinking water they bring
it boiling hot and he has to wait many hours for it to cool.

Pains in the chest. He vomits blood. There are nosebleeds, too.

Two years from fall to hanging, and almost the whole time
spent in the enclosed space of death. First in Kot Lakhpat, then in
the District Jail from which, if he had a window, he could see the
palace of his former glory. When they moved him from the first
death-cell to the second he formed the giddy conviction that no
move had taken place, that although he had experienced the sack
over the head, the shovings, the sensations of travel, of flight, they
had simply done it to disorient him, and brought him back to his

In the Fifteenth Century ? 243

starting-place. Or finishing-place. The two cells were so alike that
he would not believe he had been moved to the capital until they
let his lawyers in to tell him so.

They keep him chained around the clock. When he turns too
suddenly in his sleep the metal cuffs bite into his ankles. For one
hour a day they remove the chains; he shits, walks. And is
shackled once again. 'My morale is high,' he tells his lawyers,
'because I am not made of the wood whick burns easily.'

The death-cell, its proportions, its contents. He focuses his
mind on what is concrete, tangible, there. These flies and mosqui-
toes and cockroaches, they are his friends, he counts them, they
can be touched or crushed or borne. These iron bars enclosing
him, one to six. This flea-bag mattress, provided after he made a
fuss daily for five months, it is a victory, perhaps his last. These
chains, that lotah pot full of water too hot to touch. Something is
meant here, something intended. The death-cell holds the key to
the mystery of dying. But nobody scratched a code on any wall.

If it is a dream, and sometimes in the fever of his days he thinks
it is, then (he also knows) the dreamer is someone else. He is
inside the dream, or he would not be able to touch dream-insects;
dream-water would not burn him . . . someone is dreaming
him. God, then? No, not God. He struggles to remember Raza
Hyder's face.

Comprehension comes before the end. He, Harappa, brought
the General from the wilderness into the world. The General of
whom this cell is one small aspect, who is general, omnipresent,
omnivorous: it is a cell inside his head. Death and the General:
Iskander sees no difference between the terms. From darkness into
light, from nothingness into somethingness. I made him, I was his father,
he is my seed. And now I am less than he. They accuse Haroun of killing
his father because that is what Hyder is doing to me.

Then another step, which takes him beyond such aching sim-
plicities. The father should be superior and the son, inferior. But
now I am low and he, high. An inversion: the parent become the
child. He is turning me into his son.

His son. Who emerged dead from the womb with a noose

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Shame ? 244

about his neck. That noose seals my fate. Because now he under-
stands the cell, the throbbing walls, the smell of excrement, the
drumbeat of a foul invisible heart: death's belly, an inverse womb,
dark mirror of a birthplace, its purpose is to suck him in, to draw
him back and down through time, until he hangs foetal in his own
waters, with an umbilical cord hung fatally round his neck. He
will leave this place only when its mechanisms have done their
work, death's baby, travelling down the death canal, and the
noose will tighten its grip.

A man will wait a lifetime for revenge. The killing of Iskander
Harappa avenges the still-born child. Yes: I am being unmade.

Iskander Harappa was persuaded by his lawyers to lodge an appeal
against the High Court's sentence of death. The appeal was heard
by a bench of seven judges sitting in the Supreme Court in the
new capital. By the time the Supreme Court hearings ended he
had been in captivity for a year and a half; and a further six months
were to pass before the body of the former Prime Minister arrived
at Mohenjo in the care of Talvar Ulhaq, who had, by then, been
returned to active police duty.

Elections were not held. Raza Hyder became President. All this
is well know.

And Sufiya Zinobia?

Back goes the clock once again. It was election day and there
were many fires. Raza Hyder pouring ashes from the window of a
moving car. Isky Harappa unaware of the death-cells of the future.
And Omar Khayyam Shakil in a blue funk.

After the dismissal of Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, Omar
Khayyam grew afraid, because he saw the shapes of his early life
rising up to haunt his adulthood. Once again a Parsee girl had
been made pregnant; once again, there was a mother with a
fatherless child. The idea that there could be no escape wrapped
itself round his head like a hot towel and made it hard for him to
breathe; and on top of that he was extremely nervous of what

In the Fifteenth Century ? 245

General Hyder might do now that the ayah had been dismissed for
the crime of pregnancy and it was no longer possible to keep the
secret of whom Shahbanou had been visiting every night. What
was out in the open: the most grievous of faults, the infidelity of a
husband beneath his wife's father's roof. A betrayal of salt.

But Raza Hyder was just as agitated as Omar Khayyam, and
was not thinking about salt. After the burning of the blood-
encrusted veil he had been assailed by the thought that perhaps
Talvar Ulhaq was just a little too good to be true with his pose of
ideal son-in-lawship. Whose neck got bitten? Whose polo career
was vampirically terminated? Who might, very plausibly, have
bided his time and waited for revenge? 'Fool that I am,' Raza
cursed himself, 'I should have had the blood analysed. Maybe it
was only a goat's; but now it's all up in smoke.'